This article in the Times got me thinking about whether or not museums can do something similar with objects; that is, can museums create an "experience" like the one developed by the London Zoo in which visitors are immersed in an environment?
Art museums and historic house museums can create the same kind of environment as the London Zoo. Museums like the Philadelphia Museum of Art (my employer, for purposes of full disclosure) sometimes create "period rooms" that reproduce rooms from various locations and eras. These rooms display works of art in their original setting, providing the visitor with context and, ideally, a deeper understanding of the work.
For smaller museums, however, this kind of exhibit is difficult to create, as well as prohibitively expensive. Most museums simply don't have the resources, or for that matter, the space to design these kinds of displays. In the case of other museums, the "period room" model simply doesn't make sense. They cannot transport a room from Europe and recreate it in an American museum. Take, for example, the Philadelphia Doll Museum. The museum certainly cannot create an environment for each of the dolls, and placing them in their original context would be nearly impossible. Without allowing visitors to physically handle the dolls, how can the museum help visitors to experience them in the same way that visitors to the London Zoo get to encounter monkeys and rain forests?
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